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Left-wing activists like the Soros-backed ProPublica group helped Lois Lerner’s IRS persecute and harass conservative nonprofits that were seeking tax-exempt status. The great Daniel Webster famously remarked that the power to tax is the power to destroy. Webster’s words are as true today as they were 200 years ago. But the Obama administration, an endless source of innovation in political corruption, found a way to wield as a weapon against its political enemies the power to grant tax-exempt status.

In 2013 the American public learned that President Obama used the Internal Revenue Service to vex and harass his political opposition. That Obama’s IRS singled out conservative groups for special scrutiny ought to “send a chill” up Americans’ spines, then-House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) told Fox News. The tax-collection agency’s strong-arming of political organizations “is as dangerous a problem the government can have.”

Left-wing Democrat Lois G. Lerner, then the director of the Exempt Organizations Division at the IRS, did the Obama administration’s bidding, harassing conservative groups and funders. Lerner testified before Congress, and after protesting her innocence she suddenly invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to continue testifying. But earlier Lerner had confirmed the IRS abuses. IRS employees in the agency’s Cincinnati office targeted conservative 501(c)(4) groups, she said.